


His Black Leather

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M, daemon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-11 01:26:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4415741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A two-part Daemon AU--one part light-hearted, the other less so. The first part is a door-slamming farce, the second part a slightly....different take on "Voice from the Past."</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Black Leather

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Emotion](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106926) by [still_lycoris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_lycoris/pseuds/still_lycoris). 
  * Inspired by [Bound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1290058) by [still_lycoris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_lycoris/pseuds/still_lycoris). 
  * Inspired by [But Since I Am a Dog, Beware My Fangs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1221778) by [elviaprose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose). 



> Black leather is, of course, a very Dark Material. 
> 
> In this daemon AU, inspired by still_lycoris and elviaprose's estimable work, the featured daemons are Blake's dog daemon, Siriol; Avon's hare daemon, Aletheia; Vila's golden howler monkey Shazza; and Cally's otter, Volodya (I didn't think she would have an ocelot daemon in light of her Horizon coat). Because if you put a bunch of snarky people together in a spaceship, they'd have snarky daemons. Or, in Cally's case, a snarky telepathic daemon.

PART ONE: The Rubble With Rebels  
_Thus will I fold them one upon another,  
Now, kiss, embrace, contend, do what you will. _ (Two Gentlemen of Verona, I, ii)

“She’s got good taste,” Vila said.

“Vila!” Cally said. “Leaving to one side whether there could be anything good to be said about anyone so immoral, just look at the hideous opulence of that…that…*get-up.* Although I suppose it’s better that she spend public money on fancy dresses than on armaments or suppressants.”

“Yeh, anyone’d think that lizard pinning her dress together was her daemon, if it wasn’t made out of glass. Wouldn’t it be a turn-up for the books if some poor devil of a junior officer goes for a grope, breaks that thing, and there she is on the floor, white satin all over blood?”

Jenna gave a Mona Lisa smile. “Blake wouldn’t know whether to be ecstatic or frustrated that he wasn’t the one to do for her.”

“But, see?” Vila said, pointing to the broadcast on the main screen. A golden howler monkey daemon perched on the lectern. “*That’s* what I mean about good taste.”  
Vila’s Shazza nodded and brandished an approving revolutionary fist. 

Gan’s Adelheid, honked and then tried to pass it off as a cough.

I know, Cally’s otter Volodya, Sent. _Look at her! All airs and graces, acts like she invented thumbs_.

Birds in their little nests agree, but the daemons in general were no friendlier than their owners. However, they had stopped referring to Aletheia as a “rodent,” even though the sticky notes reading “Lagomorph! “ that Avon scattered around the walls a hand-span above the baseboards had mostly dried up and fallen down and been Auto-Cleaned.

Blake could hear Avon’s voice, although it wasn’t loud enough to discern the words clearly. Blake tapped on the door—a complex process, because he was carrying a plate of cake with two forks. The forks had been stuck in vertically, but they were slipping. It was a dense dark cake (with white frosting), but not one of those cannonball-like Christmas puddings that set off bomb detectors. Siriol raised a paw and scratched at the door. 

“It’s unlocked,” Avon said. Blake opened the door, leaving Siriol outside. Avon was curled up on the bed, wearing a dark green repp silk dressing gown. Aletheia was curled up facing in the other direction, like a Yin/Yang symbol at two different levels of resolution. A reading tablet, propped on her haunch, leaned against the wall. 

“The University of Bellhangria Journal of Conductive Ceramics,” Avon told Blake, turning off the tablet. 

“There are some interesting ideas in Tooratkian’s article that might reduce fuel consumption for ambient heating,” Aletheia said. 

“As the ship is infinitely self-powering, that’s the least of our worries,” Blake said.

“That’s what they said on Earth, before the atmosphere turned poisonous enough to require the planet to be domed,” Avon said. He scratched between Aletheia’s ears. “That’s domed, as in under a Dome, not doomed.” 

“I brought a slice of cake,” Blake said pacifically, sitting down on the desk chair and trundling it toward the bed. “See, it’s carrot.”

“Stereotypical thinking,” Aletheia said, but nevertheless, snaffled up the bit of cake that Avon broke off and fed her from his palm. Avon turned halfway around, extending his hand for Blake to lick off the remaining frosting.

“Wait. Let me disentangle everything,” Avon said, pulling his hand back from Blake’s mouth (lingering a little over the lips). He sat up, his back to the chest of drawers, his bent knee pale where it emerged from the opening of the robe. He put the plate of cake on the bed next to the tablet, then picked up Aletheia and set her on the floor. “Hop it!” he said. She did, exiting through the gap in the door that Blake had left open. Blake pushed the chair back and shut the door. He wheeled the chair back to the side of the bed. Avon handed him a fork. 

Blake handed back the fork, said, “Honestly!,” and then, as he bent to take off his boots, “Budge up!” Avon folded his legs into butterfly position, leaving just about enough room for Blake to sit at the foot of the bed with the cake plate between them.

Siriol sat on guard outside the door, stretched out along the floor. Aletheia lay down on top of her. “I’m not a Lilo, you know,” Siriol said. Aletheia said nothing, lying there with her eyes closed, just feeling the larger bellows of Siriol’s ribs go out and in, working her warm fur.

“It’s been quiet these last few weeks, hasn’t it?” Blake asked at the next crew meeting. He passed the pitcher of milk to Vila.

“Lovely,” Vila said. “I wish I could bottle the tedium, pop open the neck—I hear they do that with sabers—when we’re being shot at by all and sundry, take a big gulp of it to settle my nerves.”

“Too quiet, I’d say,” Blake said. “It’s time to get back to work!”

“Why, did you kill six dozen Scots before breakfast?” Jenna asked, with some asperity. She spread marmalade on a slice of brown bread; perhaps that had triggered the association of ideas.

“There’s a bit of a hurry, you see,” Blake said. “The Federation are decommissioning the storage facility at Fulop’s Creek.”

“Where’s that?” Gan asked.

“Bohemia. On the coast.”

“How do you know?” Cally asked. 

There was a shriek of transistors that could easily be compiled to “Give me some credit!”

“There are storerooms full of computer tapes there,” Blake said. “Pre-Tarial.” 

“Why are we trying to get ourselves killed over a lot of old rubbish?” Vila asked. 

“It’s like any historical archive,” Blake said. “An individual bit of data that seems quite dull in isolation can form part of a pattern that explains a great deal.” 

“How are we going to get in there?” Gan asked. “It can’t be as easy as all that.  
”  
“That’s because you have no imagination,” Avon said. “It’s perfectly simple, there are Federation uniforms in the Wardrobe Room, and, Vila, of course your daemon is what she is. All one has to do…” and then stopped, realizing that he’d been snookered again. “I’ve got work to do,” he said, and swept off. 

“It was your idea,” Vila told Avon, “So you’ve got to help.” Avon had been imprudent enough to hide in the FabLab, which saved Vila the trouble of persuading him to go there.

“I could withdraw the suggestion, and we could go and blow something up and stand under the debris,” Avon said. 

“No thanks!”

Avon pulled a stool over to the workbench and started up the fabricator. When the screen turned pale grey, he said, “I’ll need data. You do it, Vila. She’s yours anyway, and I’m not getting paid enough to measure simian inseams.” 

Avon didn’t think that, when the Aquitar Project sent him on that 3-D modeling course, they expected it to be used to make a drag king monkey appear accomplished with what she lacked. 

Once Shazza was kitted up for the mission, Cally operated the teleport. She wasn’t unduly worried, the mission seemed safe enough, if minor.

Fulop’s Creek was not what one could call an elite posting. If the Federation expected spit and polish, it got only half. A slatternly sloth (although it would not be fair to expect military elegance from even a Prussian sloth) slumped in front of the door behind which the troopers maintained a poker school. Tiny curlers wound through her hair and the stub of a pico-cigarette hung from her sloppily lipsticked mouth. 

Vila enjoyed play-acting, especially in the political equivalent of drag, but it made him nervous when the audience was armed. So he gave Shazza a gentle push between the shoulderblades. “Supreme Commander’s here for a surprise inspection,” she said in her gruffest voice. “So everybody’d better drop their cocks and grab their socks and head over to the colonel’s office for inspection.”

“What’s that, then?” the sentry asked, gesturing at Orac.

“Litter tray,” Vila said. “All this traveling about does shocking things to her…his…innards.”

“The Supreme Commander?”

“Well, her too, of course. But I meant the daemon.”

The sentry leaned into the room. “Right, lads, pack ‘em up…no don’t pack up *my* winnings…and head over to the colonel’s office.” 

Gan dared to hope that things were going rather well. It would be best if the last soldier leaving the room wouldn’t let the door slam, but it didn’t worry him over-much. Vila would make short work out of opening the door. Then Orac would scan the barcodes and other identifying marks on the tapes, and tell them which were important enough to be loaded into the saddlebags and knapsacks he and Vila carried. 

But, before this perfectly simple mission could be carried out, a second golden howler monkey skipped down the corridor, resulting in two simian spit-takes and a few rounds of Marxist mirror routines. Eventually the daemons decided that it was another monkey and rather than an intangible mirror appearing out of nowhere.

“Did your father have a mole upon his brow?” the newcomer asked, companionably combing Shazza’s golden fur for nits and surreptitiously checking to see if he was better hung than his putative long-lost brother.

“How would I know?” Shazza snapped, moving away to prevent too close inspection of how much she lacked of a man. “Monkeys are playas.” 

“A natural perspective, that is and is not,” whispered an awe-struck trooper on his way out of the room. “A banana cleft in two is not more like.”

Gan found the reunion rather touching, until a more serious problem occurred to him. He cleared his throat and leaned over to whisper to Vila. “You know, if we’re pretending that the Supreme Commander is on her way, the fact that there are two monkeys here suggests that we got it right somehow. So we’d best not hang about.” 

“She must be here. A daemon never leaves a man behind,” Shazza said smugly, hopping onto Orac for the trip home. 

“What would she be doing in a craphole like this…twice?” Vila asked. He decided he didn’t want to know enough to hang about there. 

Gan called in. “Get us out, Cally, it’s all gone pear-shaped.” Fortunately, the Federation witnesses, other than a monkey that Servalan never paid the slightest attention to anyway, were bustling somewhere other than the hallway and didn’t see them disappear.

“Sorry,” Gan said. He could hear Cally being disappointed. “We didn’t know Servalan was going to be there. We couldn’t risk a pitched battle, just the two of us, and I’ve got the Limiter, of course…I suppose I could have asked for reinforcements."

“Never mind,” Avon said, reading from the Job’s Comforters Playbook. “Nothing to erect an Arc de Triomphe about, but nothing for the Arc d’Etre Tue either.” He was going to say “another typical Blake plan,” but felt that some of his edge was gone and he couldn’t bring himself to embarrass Blake in public. 

Vila elaborately turned toward Gan, and away from Avon. “Poor Avon,” Vila said. “His Irritable All of Him Syndrome is acting up.”

Blake sighed. “You did your best,” he said. “It’s not the first time that our operational intelligence has been insufficient…no one was hurt, that’s the main thing. Vila, I’ll take your watch…”

“Well, I took yours, when I first met you,” Vila said. “Turnabout’s fair play.”

“Have a nice cup of tea, put your feet up,” Blake said. He looked over Vila’s shoulder, signaling, “Thanks!” to Gan with his eyes. Gan nodded. 

“I cut some sandwiches for you,” Cally said. “They’re in the chiller. Anyone for a game of Chromechexer?” 

When everyone had left the flight deck, Blake paced between his combat position and the sofa. At first Siriol followed at his heels, but after awhile she lay down in front of the sofa. Blake whacked the commlink with the heel of his hand. “Avon?” he said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m with Jenna,” the commlink crackled. “Stripping down…”

Siriol stood up and gazed inquisitively at Blake.

“The number seventeen Kebworthy booster on one of the shuttles. She said the landing gear felt a bit mushy the last time she checked it out.” 

Blake told himself not to be disappointed, and he couldn’t say a word against proper equipment maintenance. If nothing else, he approved of Avon’s work ethic; he was far more likely to be found sketching in a design for an upgrade to Liberator’s systems than idly browsing Tarial daemon-memes.

Besides, Blake wasn’t at all sure that having Avon with him would make him feel any better. Sometimes Avon’s ability to sympathize with Blake was depthless. At other times he’d say something truly vicious, when Blake was at his lowest ebb, simply because Avon had polished up a new insult and didn’t want it to go to waste.  
At least Avon’s unpredictability offered some entertainment value. Vila, in all events, would say, “Sounds dodgy to me. Let’s keep our heads down, go somewhere safe. Preferably somewhere safe and with shops and pubs and swimming baths.” Gan would say, “I’m a simple man, and I expect you’ve thought it over and chosen for the best.” Jenna would say, “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, I daresay it’s the best plan.” But those were all personal judgments, and Blake would have preferred being valued for his ideology rather than his bonhomie. At least Cally could be relied upon for a serious operational discussion. But somehow, he could not feel as close to her as he could to his fellow Terrans. 

Well, at least there was someone he could count on. “I’m at my wit’s end, old girl,” he told Siriol. “We’re always running, and at first it seems like we’ve attained a victory, but it all vanishes like sand through my fingers. An obsolete cipher here, a meaningless battle there, rescuing a person or two when what we need is to rescue planets.”

“Never mind,” Siriol said. “Your day will come.”

PART TWO: NO BEAST SO FIERCE

 _They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?_ (Troilus  & Cressida, III, 2)

Avon wrapped his legs around Blake’s waist. Blake closed his eyes and enjoyed the son et lumiere going on beneath him. “Let’s try something,” Blake said. He leaned further forward, and Avon moved along, putting his feet up on Blake’s shoulders. Blake took an ankle in each hand and pushed backward. “Those exercises of Cally’s seem to done some good,” Blake said. Then Blake’s head snapped around. 

“What’s wrong?” Avon asked.

“That sound—I keep hearing it,” Blake said. 

“Ecstasy,” Avon said smugly. 

“No, it’s a sort of tone oscillation.” Blake disengaged, lay down, and yawned. 

“If it keeps up, see Cally for some diagnostics,” Avon said. He kissed the side of Blake’s neck, and took his robe from the hook inside the cupboard. “I’d best get dressed, it’s nearly time to work on that battle computer problem Jenna reported.” 

Blake fell into an uneasy doze. There was a chime, and then a chant: “Renounce, renounce.” He said that he would never give up the cause of freedom. “Renounce dissidence. Be normal. Return. Renounce. Freedom is an illusion.” 

Blake, smelling of shower gel, and Siriol, smelling of wet dog, headed for the Flight Deck. Avon came back from the Battle Computer room, and started to ask Jenna for some specs.

Blake ignored Vila, directed Zen to switch first to manual and then to automatics, and changed the course from Del Ten to Asteroid PK One One Eight. 

Blake’s decision to cancel the team-building exercise (“retreat” sounded too ominous) on the healthful plains of Del Ten, in favor of a mined-out man-made asteroid, was not a popular one. 

“I’ve told you,” he said. “This is a priority mission.”

“To achieve what?” Avon asked. 

“I command this ship,” Blake said. 

“Do you indeed?” Avon asked. He felt it was important to remind Blake not to Presume.

“You lead,” Jenna said. “We don’t take commands.” 

“Oh, come on, Blake,” Vila said. “You explain things to us, sometimes, anyway. Maybe even before the thing if we’re lucky.” 

“This time I can’t,” Blake said. “For once just try trusting me,” he said over his shoulder. Siriol snarled. 

Eyes rolled like all the craps tables at Freedom City. 

Then Blake halted, looking up at something that was as unilaterally visible as Banquo at the banquet. “No, never!” he said. “The cause of freedom. The right to be free…”

“You what?” Vila said. “Blake, who’re you talking to? Oh, sod, did we get boarded by something again? Something invisible?” 

“Renounce!” Blake shouted, trembling all over. Avon glanced upward, to see which direction the threat requiring a body-block emanated from. “Easy, easy,” he whispered, and when that didn’t work, he shouted, “Blake!”

“Renounce!” Blake moaned.

“Cally! Tranquilizer pack!”  
“No more nightmares,” Cally said, pulling the pack out of the first aid kit under the console. Blake slumped down onto the sofa, immobile but still chanting “Renounce!” under his breath. 

Avon folded down onto the floor, holding Blake’s hand. “Right!” Cally said. “Jenna, could you get the stretcher? We’ll wheel Blake into the medbay, run some scans.” 

Cally, not as green as she was Decima-looking, made sure the straps were fastened. Avon pushed the stretcher. They transferred Blake onto the diagnostic bed, set the scanners going, and stepped outside the room. Siriol growled. “It’s all right, girl,” Cally said. “We want what you want. We’re going to help him.”

“Let’s get this sorted before the tranquilizer wears off,” Cally whispered to Avon. “There seems to be some external indoctrination process going on,” she said. 

“He said he heard some sort of tone,” Avon said. “Hmmm. I wouldn’t be surprised if an oscillating tone were used as a trigger. Well, that tears it, we’ve got to change course back to Del Ten.” He triggered the commlink. “Zen, reinstate the course for Del Ten.” 

“No, don’t,” Jenna said, smug in the knowledge that Zen would take her word over Avon’s any day. Aias nodded. “Avon, clear it through Orac first, get a fuller diagnosis.” How odd, she thought. Orac hasn’t got a daemon. No wonder he’s so peremptory about everything he says, he’s got no one to talk it over with. I’d say that Orac was Zen’s daemon, except they don’t seem to like each other much. But then Blake and Siriol don’t seem to be close as they should be. Even Avon and that flop-eared idiot are thick as thieves. And he *would* have a daemon that’s renowned for being too randy to think straight.

“And now I can hear it,” Avon said. “The tone, I mean.” 

Oh, you finally think he’s right about something? “Sorry, Avon,” Cally said. 

“These frequencies are commonly used by crimino-therapists,” Orac said. 

“Yes, I’ve read about that,” Cally said. “Used in memory revision. A dreadful practice. First drugs are administered, with the signal used as a conditioning tool, and then finally the signal by itself is enough to induce auto-hypnosis.”

“We can’t let him give orders while he’s like…this,” Avon said. The tenderness on his face as he looked down at Blake wrung Cally’s heart. “Orac, what’s to be done?”  
Jenna and Vila arrived. “How do you know there is anything to be done?”

“It’s a scientific problem,” Avon said. “So there must be a scientific solution,” just as Cally said, “If it was deliberately done by humans there must be a way to reverse it.”

Blake sprang up, half-rising from the sensor bed. Avon put an arm around his shoulder, their foreheads touching. “Must speak, must listen to me,” Blake said. “False, false!”

“False what?” Orac said. “False evidence? False trial? False verdict?”

“Guilty.”

“Believe your innocence, Blake,” Orac said. “Thank you,” Avon said.  
“Guilty.”

“Conditioned under hypnosis.” 

Blake kept struggling, until Avon grabbed his shoulders, shook him, and pushed him down with one hand. Avon extended his other hand, mouthing, “Tranquilizer patch!” 

“I bet you’ve felt like doing that more than once,” Shazza said.

“Other way round, more like,” Vila said.

When Blake subsided again, Jenna turned to Orac. “What is the treatment, then?”

“To remove the deeply implanted conditioning, a minimum of two hours’ eradication therapy. Five minutes of treatment each hour, followed by fifty-five minutes’ rest.”

“Make it fifty minutes and a big bill, and it could be psychostrategy,” Vila said. 

Avon took a couple of paper handkerchiefs from the dispenser on the wall and blotted away the sweat on Blake’s face. “How does the therapy work?”

“Creation of a sensornet connection with the one closest to Blake,” Orac said. 

“I could have told you that,” Siriol said. “All right, let’s get on with it.” 

“Do we need a larger patch to account for the fur?” Cally asked Orac. 

“A double thickness,” Orac said. 

The people (and Orac, in Avon’s arms) left the medbay. 

Jenna canceled the course to Asteroid PK One One Eight and resumed the course for Del Ten. Aletheia said, “We told you so.” Aias honked. 

“Vila, go see if Blake’s all right,” Avon said.

“Who died and made *you* king?” 

“Someone much more intelligent than anyone who would put you in charge of anything. But don’t you care how Blake is doing?”

“Bet I care more than you do,” Vila muttered. Vila helped Blake to sit up. Shazza poured a glass of Vitazade, and held it while Blake drank it. 

“Got us back on course for Del Ten, have they?” Vila nodded. “You know what’s happening, don’t you?”

“Happening?”

“Jenna and Cally. Paired up. Mutual affinities.”

“Why, the dirty slappers!” Vila said. “I mean, some hope they’d let me watch, but they could at least have told me and fired up my imagination.” He made a note to himself to suggest to Blake that they needed some extra crewmembers. Particularly girls who liked blokes, who now seemed to be in short supply. There was probably a rule, under the Stock Equalization Act. 

“Why do you think they’re so keen to get us to Del Ten?”

“It’s all this blowing things up and getting chased by heavily armed maniacs,” Vila said. “Takes it out of you. Who wouldn’t want a nice holiday?”

“Our only hope—well, our nearest hope—is this asteroid. If they get to Del Ten, there’s no saying what they’ll do to you. Still, buck up, perhaps they’ll just leave you there. Or even let you stay on, bulk up the crew numbers.” 

“What do we do?” Vila said, feeling a little warmed by his battlefield promotion.

“Two things,” Blake said. “Change the course, get us safely to PK One One Eight. Oh, and undo these restraints, of course.”

“Just like the old days, eh? No wonder you don’t want more of that.” Vila and Shazza unbuckled the straps. 

By the time Vila finished activating the commlink and ordering Zen to switch the course back to PK One One Eight, and turned to tell Blake that they should arrive in about half an hour, Blake was gone. 

“Oh, god, not again,” Jenna said, feeling the Liberator turn around. “I’ll go up to the flight deck to check.” Blake had already been to the flight deck and moved on to his next surmise, that Jenna, Cally, and Avon were in the crewroom. This was auspicious for his purposes, because it was an enclosed space. With a door. And a lock. Before Jenna could leave, Blake slammed the door, and then smashed the lock with a probe. 

_I bet that bitch had something to do with it_ , Volodya Sent to Cally.

“Hush, Volodya, I’m sure she didn’t,” Cally said.

“There’s something not right there,” Aias said. 

“It’s true,” Jenna said. “Dog daemons are even more affectionate than ordinary dogs, yet sometimes Blake and Siriol hardly seem to be on speaking terms.”  
_That’s never stopped Blake from stuffing Avon silly_ , Volodya Sent. To cover her embarrassment, Cally asked, “Avon? How are you getting on with that lock?” It was bad enough people overhearing things she wouldn’t have said out loud, with Volodya saying things she didn’t even let herself think.

“I’m doing my best,” Avon said. “I don’t carry full burglar kit on my person when I’m at home.” 

“Cally, what d’you think?” Jenna asked. “Why is Blake so obsessed with this particular asteroid?”

“I think it’s the source of an artificial telepathic transmission,” she said. “It’s a sort of magnet for him. And if there’s a transmitter, there must be someone to operate it.”

“Or something,” Avon said. “It could be a fully mechanized process. But someone must have set it up. As usual, probably someone we do not want to meet. And indeed would avoid at Standard by Eight at least.”

“I see we’ve arrived at PK One One Eight, Vila,” Blake said, from the teleport bay. He tested the fastenings of his extra-vehicle suit. Siriol, of course, did not need safety gear. “Send us down.”

“Well, what about the other lot?” Vila asked.

“We’ll keep them…on ice…for a little while. Bring them to their senses.”

As soon as Blake shimmered out, Shazza said, “If I had to wait for them to come to their senses, you’d need a tortoise demon.” 

“ I don’t need that lot. I don’t need anybody, except you.”

Shazza glared at Vila until he sighed, said, “Oh, all right,” and went back to his cabin to get the esky. 

Blake looked around the Liberator’s indecisive destination. It did not, on first glance, seem worth the trouble: an ordinary mining set-up with an ore extraction plant located over the pit, an office hut, and ramshackle dormitories. 

The airlock worked. Blake observed that the air system and artificial gravity field were working, and there were even lights on. He shut down his torch and tucked it into his belt in case he needed it later. The meter on his teleport bracelet showed that the air was breathable. 

As he took off his helmet, a door opened, revealing a man in archaic robes, with a very contemporary gun. Blake contemplated calling for immediate teleport, but decided to let the situation play out. He held up his hands. “I have no weapons,” he said. “I followed the signal. Who are you? Why did you want me here?” 

Vila listened to the pounding and shouting coming from the crewroom. “What’ll you give me if I get you out of there?” he asked, through the door.

“Survival?” Avon suggested. “Or at least, deferral of the point at which annoying me becomes a capital offense?”

“Poor choice of incentives,” Jenna said. “I can tell you’ve never been in charge of anything. Look, Vila, something’s obviously gone wrong, and we need to get out of here to help Blake.” 

Vila, who was already working on the door, got it open more or less as Blake walked into a large room in the PK One One Eight bunker. A man whose body was wrapped in coarse cloth, and most of whose face was wrapped in stained bandages, staggered toward Blake. “Brother!” he groaned. For a moment, Blake was horror-struck. The man who claimed fraternity looked like an apparition who had staggered out of an ancient grave, dressed in a winding sheet, bandages preventing his jaw from falling away from his skull. Quite chap-fallen, Blake thought. And, trying to control his shudders, He looks like my death. As I am, he once was. As he is, so I will be. 

Siriol cleared her throat encouragingly and pointed her muzzle at the man’s daemon—a greyhound, her thinness elegant, not the stigmata of famine. She looked healthy and alert. Blake patted Siriol’s head, reassured by the kernel of health that must therefore be buried deep within the man’s body. 

“I’m Blake,” he said. “Roj Blake. This is Siriol. And who are you, my friend?” 

“Shivan,” said the memento mori, holding up a medallion on a chain around his neck. “Look. The emblem of our cause.” Blake’s eyes flicked back and forth between the man with the gun and his putative ally. “The cause of freedom.” 

Siriol and Shivan’s daemon, Mortdargent, engaged in the sniffing-and-licking etiquette of a morning call, as if they were old friends, and curled up together in a corner of the room.

The man with the gun holstered it, and helped Shivan to lower himself down to a banquette. “I am Nagu,” the man said. “This is Shivan, defender of truth. He called you here by the strength of our hope to fight for liberty.”

“But he died in a Federation trap,” Blake said. 

“A cover story,” Nagu said. “It can be useful, to deter pursuit. He has suffered much, but, as you see, survived to use whatever strength remains in the struggle.” 

“He’s a good’un, Blake,” Siriol said. “You can trust him.” 

Yet another man appeared. Blake flinched violently. “Forgive me,” Ven Glynd said. “I’ve defected, you see. And what I helped do to you was the last step that made me realize that everything I’d done, everything I believed, was wrong.”

Blake glanced over at Siriol, who nodded. 

Blake wished that Orac had provided this important information, but then, he reflected, Orac was notably parsimonious with information not specifically solicited with the correct form of words. 

“Now there’s hope, you see?” Ven Glynd said. “I’ve enough evidence to bring down Servalan and her whole rotten regime. The hundred million credits she embezzled on the pretext of buying some super-computer. No doubt a fabrication of her own. And, rather more personal to you, the report on that shoddy travesty of your trial, and the murder of your advocate. All this evidence I am on my way to Atlay to present to the Governors’ Summit Meeting. Governor LeGrand of Outer Gall is our ally.  
“Do you have medical facilities?” Shivan asked. The rawness of the plea stung Blake’s eyes. 

“Yes, excellent ones,” Blake said. “And a trained health worker.”

Glynd, standing behind Shivan, rested his hand consolingly on Shivan’s shoulder. “I fear that our friend is not strong enough to go to Atlay,” he said. “But if you could bring him to your base for further treatment.” Blake read the message in Glynd’s eyes easily enough: You can’t cure him, but he can die happy, knowing that he’s with the leader of our cause.

Slowly, struggling, Shivan reached to his neck, forcing the clawed hands to close around the chain and move, centimeter by centimeter, to lift the pendant over the monstrous melon of bandages on his head. He tried to hold it over Blake’s head, like a crown, but his strength failed. Blake held out his hand and caught the pendant before it fell.

“For you,” Shivan said. “Our leader. All I have left to give.”

Siriol stood up, at attention. Blake was glad that Avon wasn’t there; he’d find some way to spoil this moment of honest emotion. 

Blake opened the clasp on the chain—he didn’t think the chain was long enough not to be caught in his hair—and fastened the magenta disk around his neck. Then he crossed the floor to Siriol. He unclasped the spare bracelet hanging from her collar. “Put this on,” he told Shivan. Blake noticed that, as he called for teleport, Ven Glynd looked keenly interested. Shivan didn’t even turn his one visible eye toward Blake’s wrist. 

“Ah, good, you’re all here,” Blake said blandly, as they arrived in the teleport bay. 

“No thanks to you,” Avon said. “Vila got us out. Playing both sides against the middle.” 

“Let’s talk about it later, shall we? This is Shivan, our brother in the struggle. Cally, can you please show him the medbay and see what can be done to help him?”

“Of course,” she said. “Don’t worry, Shivan, I’m stronger than I look,” she said, putting his arm around her shoulder and sliding her own arm around his waist. 

“Splendid news!” Blake said. “Ven Glynd has defected. He’s on his way to Atlay, to give a tremendous amount of valuable Federation intelligence to Governor LeGrand. Together, they will be able to bring down Space Command—and Servalan with it—and peacefully at that.” 

“Ven Glynd?” Jenna asked. “Can we trust him?”

Blake started to say, “Of course!” when he dropped to his knees, as if pole-axed, his hands pressed to his temples; his head ached as if a spear had been driven through it. “Renounce!” he said. “Renounce! Renounce!”

“Oh, not that again,” Avon said, echoed by Vila. Avon lowered himself, one tightly swathed leg at a time, to the floor. He wrapped his hand around the magenta medallion. “One could hide any amount of triggering devices in this,” he said, and pulled until the chain came loose. He threw it as far as he could, down the corridor.

“Ow! What did you have to do that for?” Blake said, evidently himself once again. 

“So much for the effectiveness of dual therapy,” Avon said. Then he said, “Unless the attack was biometric as well as mechanical…”

Volodya galloped into the teleport bay. “Your ‘brother’ has attacked Cally!” he said. 

“There are all sorts of families,” Avon said. “The House of Atreus, the Cenci…”

“Is she badly hurt?” Jenna asked. “Where is she?”

“She’s had a good knock on the bonce, and she’s in the medbay. Or, but she’s in the medbay, I suppose, so she can be treated right there.”  
“She’ll keep,” Vila said. “What about wossname? “It’s Travis,” Volodya said. “Once he got into the medbay, he shrugged off that burlap sack he was wearing, unwrapped the bandages, and lunged for her before we could do anything. Well, I’m faster than his daemon, anyway, ‘cos I’m smaller.” 

“Jenna, could you please see what you can do for Cally?” Blake asked. “The rest of us, let’s split up and find him. At least we’re on home ground.”

“Or wait for him to find us,” Vila said. “Makes a change not to have to go anywhere for it to be a trap. Saves boot leather.” 

Avon hared off, following Aletheia; by the time it occurred to him to ask Orac where Travis was, Blake had already located him and was silently approaching behind him, on the blindside. Avon crashed along the other side of the corridor, drawing fire from Travis’ lazeron. Vila, despite himself, ran toward the source of the noise to find out what was happening. Shazza leaped at Travis, wrapping her limbs around his leg, scooting up to his hip, then to his arm—one, two, three!, perched on his shoulder, and bit his ear. 

Once Travis was subdued, Blake folded his legs tailor-style and sat down on the floor, looking into Siriol’s eyes. Reflexively, he reached out to pat her head, then drew his hand back. “How could you do it? The closest of relationships, closer even than mother and child…how could you break my heart with your disloyalty?”

“My disloyalty?” she said. “I’ve always been loyal, not to a person but to our country. You’re the one who’s been a traitor, over and over, when you were given a chance to repent.” 

In addition to a wardrobe room and treasure room of obscure purpose, the Liberator had a brig, whose purpose was all too obvious. Travis was consigned there.  
“Let’s meet up on the flight deck in an hour, for debriefing,” Blake said. “Jenna, can you and Orac please do a systems check to see if Travis was able to do any damage? Thanks to Volodya, I don’t think he had time to do much harm, but better safe than sorry, of course.”

“Man of the match, Volodya,” Vila said. 

When they met again, Jenna gave the first report. “Systems A-OK,” she said. 

“Not much harm done, then, apart from the attack on Cally, from which I think you’ve made a good recovery?” Blake said. Cally nodded. 

+INFORMATION+, Zen said. +Federation forces attacked the conference at Atlay. Ven Glynd and Petronella LeGrand are both dead.+ 

There was a moment of silence, broken by Avon. “What are we going to do about Travis? I’ve said it before, he’s not just some poor devil of a conscript. If you have the chance to kill him,then do it,” Avon said. 

“I’m going to let him go,” Blake said. “Drop him off at the nearest habitable planet.” 

“What do you think about that, Cally?” Avon asked.

Cally gave a small smile. A healing patch peeked over the back of her collar. “Don’t concern yourself, Avon, it’s quite all right with me.” Something in her tone made Avon glance up at the translucent pane of the star chart. He whistled. 

“Ah. I see. Our course leads us past Zircasta. In that case, I must rephrase my objection, and re-cast myself as Goldilocks. Releasing him is better than he deserves. His likely fate in that place, where he would be hard-put to disguise himself, and where he is a renegade with no support from Space Command, would probably be worse than he deserves.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Cally said. 

“Oh, all right,” Avon said. “I’ll go and kill him myself. Then at least we’ll have one fewer thing to worry about.” 

“Too late,” Blake said equably. 

“So by ‘I’m going to let him go’ you meant ‘I’ve already let him go, and you’ll just have to put up with it.’” Avon said, his voice merging into an actual rather than implied growl. 

Mortdargent sprang out, but stopped when Blake looked into her face, capturing her eyes with his glance. 

“There has been, well, I suppose you’d say, an exchange,” Blake said. “It turned out that Siriol was never mine, not in the way that all of your daemons belong to you. She’s gone. And now we have a new—guest.” 

“That’s impossible,” Avon said flatly. “It can’t be done.” 

“Oh, I should hope you’re wrong,” Blake said. “For the system of government to change, people will have to change. And if intercission can be imposed as a torture, why may’n’t we do the equivalent, of our own choice?” 

“Blake, I can see that there’s a certain style to it, even a touch of nobility, but it’s completely mad.”

“After all this time, Avon, I should think that you’d understand that even if it’s completely mad, there’s a touch of nobility to it,” Blake said. He bent down to Mortdargent. “I think I’ll call you Buttercup. Come on, girl, I’m sure we have a lot to talk about.”

The life capsule touched down. Travis’ right hand was too weak to open the battered lid, so he wrenched it open with his left. Siriol climbed out. Travis staggered out at last. “You’ve failed, damn you,” he told her. 

“And you’ve failed. Again.” Siriol told him. 

A bark defined itself into bitter laughter. “You sound just like Servalan, but with better dress sense.”

 _The world was all before them, where to choose_  
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:  
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow  
Through Eden took their solitary way. (Paradise Lost, Book XII 646-9)


End file.
